Background
William Hubbs Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 1, 1924, the son of William B. Rehnquist, a wholesale paper salesman, and Margery Peck Rehnquist.
(The Founding Fathers wanted the judicial branch to serve ...)
The Founding Fathers wanted the judicial branch to serve as a check on the power of the legislative and executive, and gave the Supreme Court the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution in a way that would safeguard individual freedoms. Sadly, the Supreme Court has handed down many destructive decisions on cases you probably never learned about in school. In The Dirty Dozen, two distinguished legal scholars shed light on the twelve worst cases, which allowed government to interfere in your private contractual agreements; curtail your rights to criticize or support political candidates; arrest and imprison you indefinitely, without filing charges; seize your private property, without compensation, when someone uses the property for criminal activity--even if you don't know about it!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1935308270/?tag=2022091-20
(In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contes...)
In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contested 1876 race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden was in many ways as remarkable in its time as Bush versus Gore was in ours. Chief Justice William Rehnquist offers readers a colorful and peerlessly researched chronicle of the post—Civil War years, when the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marked by misjudgment and scandal, and Hayes, Republican governor of Ohio, vied with Tilden, a wealthy Democratic lawyer and successful corruption buster, to succeed Grant as America’s chief executive. The upshot was a very close popular vote (in favor of Tilden) that an irremediably deadlocked Congress was unable to resolve. In the pitched battle that ensued along party lines, the ultimate decision of who would be President rested with a commission that included five Supreme Court justices, as well as five congressional members from each party. With a firm understanding of the energies that motivated the era’s movers and shakers, and no shortage of insight into the processes by which epochal decisions are made, Chief Justice Rehnquist draws the reader intimately into a nineteenth-century event that offers valuable history lessons for us in the twenty-first.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375713212/?tag=2022091-20
(For the first time, a sitting chief justice has written a...)
For the first time, a sitting chief justice has written a book about the operation of the United States Supreme Court and in doing so has made it both fascinating and comprehensible to the average citizen. Photos.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688057144/?tag=2022091-20
(Title: The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia: Being a ...)
Title: The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia: Being a Collection of All such Acts of the General Assembly, of a Public and Permanent Nature as are Now in Force; with a General Index. To Which are Prefixed, the Constitution of the United States; the Declaration of Rights; and the Constitution of Virginia. Published Pursuant to an Act of the General Assembly, Entitled "An Act Providing for the Re-publication of the Laws of This Commonwealth," Passed March 12, 1819. Author: Benjamin Watkins Leigh, William Waller Hening, William Mumford, H. Carrington Publisher: Gale, Making of Modern Law Description: The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926 contains a virtual goldmine of information for researchers of American legal history --- an archive of the published records of the American colonies, documents published by state constitutional conventions, state codes, city charters, law dictionaries, digests and more. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ SourceLibrary: Yale Law Library DocumentID: LPSY0111301 SecondaryDocType: State Codes SourceBibCitation: The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926 PublicationPlace: United States ImprintFull: Richmond: Thomas Ritchie, 1819 ImprintYear: 1819 Collation: 2 v. ; 23 cm
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1277104522/?tag=2022091-20
(Title: An abridgment of the laws of the United States, or...)
Title: An abridgment of the laws of the United States, or, A complete digest of all such acts of Congress as concern the United States at large : to which is added, an appendix containing all existing treaties ... Author: William Graydon Publisher: Gale, Sabin Americana Description: Based on Joseph Sabin's famed bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana, Sabin Americana, 1500--1926 contains a collection of books, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas, from the time of their discovery to the early 1900s. Sabin Americana is rich in original accounts of discovery and exploration, pioneering and westward expansion, the U.S. Civil War and other military actions, Native Americans, slavery and abolition, religious history and more. Sabin Americana offers an up-close perspective on life in the western hemisphere, encompassing the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of North America in the late 15th century to the first decades of the 20th century. Covering a span of over 400 years in North, Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, this collection highlights the society, politics, religious beliefs, culture, contemporary opinions and momentous events of the time. It provides access to documents from an assortment of genres, sermons, political tracts, newspapers, books, pamphlets, maps, legislation, literature and more. Now for the first time, these high-quality digital scans of original works are available via print-on-demand, making them readily accessible to libraries, students, independent scholars, and readers of all ages. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ SourceLibrary: Huntington Library DocumentID: SABCP01312701 CollectionID: CTRG94-B2978 PublicationDate: 18030101 SourceBibCitation: Selected Americana from Sabin's Dictionary of books relating to America Notes: Vol. 2 printed by William Gillmor. Includes index. Collation: 2 v
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/127567206X/?tag=2022091-20
William Hubbs Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 1, 1924, the son of William B. Rehnquist, a wholesale paper salesman, and Margery Peck Rehnquist.
Alter graduating from high school in Shorewood, Wisconsin, he attended Keynon College in Ohio for a year before joining the Army Air Corp in 1943 and spending die next three years as a weather observer in North Africa.
After World War II, Rehnquist used the G.I. Bill and a willingness to hold a steady stream of parе-time jobs to attend Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in political science. He added to this a master’s degree from Harvard in government before returning to Stanford for law school. The man who would one day be chief justice graduated first in his class of 1952.
Upon graduating from law school, Rehnquist accepted a judicial clerkship with Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson on the Supreme Court. As a clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson as the Court was preparing to consider Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the case that eventually held racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The memorandum argued that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had approved segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, was rightly decided and should be followed in Brown.
In 1953 Rehnquist married Natalie Cornell. This marriage lasted until Natalie’s death in 1991 and produced three children: James, Janet, and Nancy. Rehnquist and his wife moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he practiced law from 1953 until 1969. Once Kleindienst was in this position, he found a place for Rehnquist in the Nixon administration as deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department in 1969. Two years later, in September 1971, Justice John Marshall Harlan retired from the Court, giving Nixon the chance to make his fourth and last appointment to the Supreme Court. He chose William Rehnquist. Although the nomination met stiff resistance in the Senate, Rehnquist was confirmed by a vote of 68-26 on December 10, 1971. He thus began a career on the Court that would extend into the 21st century.
In summer 1986 Chief Justice Warren E. Burger announced his intent to retire from the Court after 17 years of service. President Ronald Reagan promptly nominated Associate Justice William Rehnquist to become the Court’s 16th chief justice. Confirmation debates in the Senate reprised those that had occurred 15 years earlier, on Rehnquist’s original nomination to the Court. Finally, he was confirmed as chief justice by a vote of 65-13. He assumed his new office on September 26, 1986, the date Warren Burger formally retired from the Court.
Rehnquist was soon joined on the Court by two justices arguably even more conservative than he: Antonin Scalia, appointed by President Reagan to fill the position of associate justice that Rehnquist had vacated to become chief; and Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush in 1991. No longer the principal conservative spokesman on the Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist seems to have paid more attention to the work of developing widespread agreement on important cases. Before he assumed the Court’s chief seat, he had praised one of his predecessors, Charles Evans Hughes, for his efforts to build public confidence in the Court by seeking to present a uniform voice whenever possible, even when it meant resisting the urge to write dissenting opinions.
(In 1795 the Virginia Legislature passed an act directing ...)
(The Founding Fathers wanted the judicial branch to serve ...)
(Title: An abridgment of the laws of the United States, or...)
(For the first time, a sitting chief justice has written a...)
(Title: The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia: Being a ...)
(In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contes...)
(Reprint)
Author: The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is, 1987, Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson, 1992, All the Laws But One, 1999, Centennial Crisis, The Disputed Election of 1876, 2003. Contributor articles to professional journals.
He became active in Republican party politics in Phoenix and campaigned for Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate in the 1964 elections. His political activity brought him into contact with another Phoenix lawyer, Richard Kleindienst, who eventually became deputy attorney general under President Richard Nixon.
Rehnquist’s conservative credentials were solidly in place before he advanced to the Court, and they did not waver after he arrived. In his early years on the Court, although he was the fourth Nixon appointee, he sometimes found himself the only justice of this group to carry the conservative vanguard in dissent. Most conspicuously, he alone of the Nixon appointees dissented from the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), recognizing a constitutional right of abortion. He was joined in that dissent by Justice Byron White, who had been appointed, curiously enough, by President John F. Kennedy. The same year, when the Court in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) found that a federal law discriminated on the basis of gender by providing extra benefits to male members of the armed forces, Rehnquist dissented as well, this time alone.
Sometimes the other Nixon appointees joined Rehnquist in dissents, such as when Chief Justice Burger and Associate Justices Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell dissented together with Rehnquist in Furman v. Georgia (1972), which temporarily invalidated the use of the death penalty as so arbitrary as to violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.” But overall, Rehnquist outstripped the other Nixon appointees in his willingness to challenge what he viewed as overly broad readings of constitutional protections. Nixon, forced from office himself as a result of his role in the Watergate scandal, left no surer legacy on the Court than William Rehnquist.
As the 1970s progressed, Justice Rehnquist proved more successful in marshaling the Court’s other nominally conservative justices in his campaign to revisit the relationship between states and the national government in the federal system. Prior to 1937, the Supreme Court had regularly rebuffed congressional attempts to regulate matters deemed by the Court to be properly within the province of states. But beginning in 1937, with the threat of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “courtpacking” plan, the Supreme Court abandoned this constitutional posture and gave a free rein to federal laws seeking to regulate a variety of economic and social matters. Rehnquist authored the Court’s opinion in National League of Cities v. Usery (1976), which briefly reinvigorated the constitutional boundaries between states and the national government by holding that Congress had no authority to make certain minimum wage and maximum hour requirements of federal law applicable to state and municipal employees. Slightly less than a decade later, a new majority on the Court overruled National League of Cities. But in the 1990s, after Rehnquist became chief justice, he led the Court to other challenges of federal power over states.
American Bar Association, American Judicature Society, etc.
In 1953 Rehnquist married Natalie Cornell. This marriage lasted until Natalie’s death in 1991 and produced three children: James, Janet, and Nancy.